: Re: Avoiding a juvenile/archaic feel in formal verse Formal verse appears vulnerable to seeming archaic because it has generally fallen out of fashion. It may also increase the sense of immaturity,

@Deb2945533

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Create your own meter.

One that defies the rules. One that does follow constraints but not classical ones, but ones you've created by yourself.

My example approach: rhyming scheme:

A B A C B
D E D C D

Five-verse stanzas with one verse rhymed across stanzas. That's unorthodox. That's modern. That's restraining and challenging, but it doesn't fall into old, worn schemes.

Touch upon old, archaic schemes, like sonnet which requires repeating rhymes across stanzas (ABBA ABBA CDC CDC) or other restricting forms, a pantoum, a villanelle, but adapt them, change them to be your own, to violate the rules in ways you allow - or add restrictions of your own. You aren't immature creator of doggerel or a petrified, old writer of epic hexameter. You set your own rules - and then you follow them. You respect the ancients but you don't let them restrain you - or you shove additional restraints in their face.

There are countless meters. And roughly half of them is ancient and classic. Just reach for the other half without falling for the pitfall of some doggerel. Or violate the rules in some other way - adapt a classic scheme but subvert the topic, force modern themes into ancient frame.

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!

From The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.

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